


Brittle

by Saintduma



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Comfort/Angst, Fluff and Angst, Good Loki, Hurt Tony Stark, M/M, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-01
Updated: 2013-10-01
Packaged: 2017-12-28 02:38:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/986687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saintduma/pseuds/Saintduma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was an art prompt on frost-iron.tumblr.com that I really wanted to fill as a fic:</p><p>http://frost-iron.tumblr.com/post/60485484250/art-prompt-after-seeing-tony-nearly-die-loki-sneaks</p><p>I started it this morning and wrote it on and off all day on my phone.  I hope you like it.  This isn't as heavy as most of my stuff~</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brittle

Loki shoved at Thor with all his might, his green eyes blazing furious. The god of mischief would not be denied this-- no matter how much his caring brother argued. 

“He’s barely stable,” Natasha said, behind Loki. Thor took the moment to fortify himself again against his brother’s pushing. The black-haired god scowled at her, but she didn’t blink. She never did. He respected her for that. “They won’t let anyone in until they’re sure he won’t take a turn for the worse. Give them twenty-four hours and you’ll be able to see him.” 

It sounded so reasonable, didn’t it? Natasha always sounded reasonable. It was what made her so good at what she did. Loki refused to look at Thor’s face, refused to look at the pity there. 

“Fine,” he snarled, but he wouldn’t wait. How could they ask him to wait? How could they ask him to wait one minute longer to see with his own eyes that Tony wasn’t--

“Loki,” Thor called as the dark god stalked out of the emergency room waiting area. He heard Natasha stop him with a quiet word, but he didn’t pause to listen. Twenty-four hours. How could they ask him for that?

He stalked the glass balcony of Stark Tower, where several years before he had made his dramatic turn from villain to terrifying hero, using the power of the Tesseract to amplify the impact of the explosive Tony had carried into space and cripple Thanos and the Chitauri in one blow. His duplicity was sealed when he used his power to restart the human’s heart, and then willingly submitted to Midgardian justice. The Avengers were convinced; SHIELD was satisfied, but always distrusting. They didn’t interfere with him, so he made no attempts to assuage their suspicions. 

If they needed proof of his fealty, all they needed was to look at him now. He was sick with concern, and these mortal idiots wanted him to wait _twenty-four hours_ to see that Tony was not in fact dead. 

It hurt his soul. 

Tony was the one who had vouched for him first. Who had voiced his doubt that this was some long game of Loki’s, turning to be Midgard’s ally, who had asked Loki, straightforward, in front of all of the Avengers and their SHIELD handlers whether Loki had some other game in all of this. It was Tony’s dark eyes that Loki had looked into and told them, frankly, that he did not. 

He had not come to burrow in this world. But the taste he’d had of ruling- and failing- had left his tongue bitter in the darkness between realms, left him fearing the loneliness of a throne, and it was simply his luck that Thanos’ own lust for power had seen that loneliness and thought it longing. 

Loki hated to fail. 

Tony’s mortal wound had been a failure. Loki could have dealt with those burning men, could have kept them at bay, frozen them into submission-- but Tony was trying some new projectile that would subdue them without magic, and Loki had failed-- _failed!_ \--to see one approaching from Tony’s rear. And then he could smell the burning flesh, and knew something terrible had happened. 

Humans were so _brittle_.

He paced until well past dark, pausing only to reassure Pepper, Tony's old flame, from whom he had amicably parted two years ago. She still ran his company, but "superhero stuff" had come between them, and when Tony proved as unable to separate his personal and public life as he had always been, she had taken a graceful leave of their relationship. 

Tony had not taken it gracefully. While Pepper made a warm statement about their time together to the press, Tony had holed himself up with alcohol, refused the press, and come close to a disastrous incident in the suit that had ended in Captain America diverting him back to Malibu and a long argument with Loki about worthiness and disappointment that Loki suspected Tony did not entirely remember happened. 

Loki remembered, though. Loki remembered, and feeling responsible for Tony's grievous injury, Loki felt unworthy. He hated that feeling.

The city that never slept had reached the time of night that only the drunk and insomnia-ridden were still roaming the streets. It was time.

Loki found his way to the hospital easily enough, and trusted his memory well enough to find Tony's window among the hundreds the hospital was faced with. It did not open enough to fit a man through, but Loki was a god, not a man, and he had little trouble.

The smell of antiseptic and dead flesh was overwhelming. The man of iron looked as delicate as paper flowers, his skin altogether too pale, those rosy lips stretched and taped over a tube that jutted out like some invasive alien. The sound of the beeping machines and that obscene tube pushing air into Tony's lungs was discordant enough to make Loki wonder how Tony slept at all-- but of course, they had put him in an artificial coma. His wounds were too grievous to attend while he had any sort of consciousness. 

"I cannot stand this," Loki said, knowing full well the mortal could not hear him. "I do not understand how you bear such risk, and new so cavalier, when you're _so_ fragile. Your suit does not make you invincible and you know that better than any other person and yet..." 

He gave a sigh and sat heavily in the chair beside his bed, inelegant with his long limbs so sprawled. 

"Tony," he murmured. "You can't be so cavalier. You are-- so much more important than your inventions. You... contribute, as a human, to your species-- you--"

He struggled with words. How to explain, how desperate he had been to simply not be hunted, and how he had written off humanity as a whole for a species his brother was fond of because of some charming glimpse he'd had of them. And then to come to Midgard, and find such clever, determined, fragile creatures pushing desperately towards-- they didn't even have a clear vision of where they wanted to go. They just went. And among them, this man, with such vision, such clarity, who fought through such insanity, and-- thinking Loki his enemy-- genuinely looked at him. Looked at him, and gave him a chance to surrender. 

Loki would have liked to surrender to him, this clever, clear-sighted human, but the time had not come yet. He had waited until he was certain those bracelets meant Tony would survive, and played his cards as he’d stacked them. And it had worked.

This damned human. 

“You can’t die,” Loki murmured, covering his face with his hands. Helpless. That was the feeling he had been pushing against since Tony had been loaded into the Quinjet and taken away. Helpless. 

He stayed until he heard a nurse coming to do rounds, almost an hour and a half later. He closed the window as he went. 

Tony was in a coma a long time. 

They let him have visitors-- one at a time-- after the second day, and Loki went the first day, but could not stand to look at him then, while the diluted sunlight made Tony’s skin look as thin as paper, made him look so fucking frail. 

He couldn’t do it. 

He came at night, and would stay the entire night through, hiding on the minute ledge outside the window when the nurses came, slipping back in to talk to him while he slept, ranting, sometimes, or just watching him sleep, willing his lungs to fill each time they emptied, despite the fact all of that was done by a machine. It was painful to see him struggle, but Loki could not look away. He had to watch him. 

Natasha had noticed. Of course she had-- that was what she was there to do. Notice everything. She was waiting when Loki returned one morning, an hour before dawn, sitting in his kitchen, reading the cookbook he’d been scribbling in since he’d started having to cook for himself. 

“You use too much salt in everything,” she said offhand. Loki stiffened; she was trying to put him at ease. 

“It’s impossible to get a proper roasted taste in Midgard, so I overcompensate,” he replied, crossing his arms. She looked him over, from his riding boots up to his black designer sweater. 

“He’s not going to get better because you stare at him all night, Loki.” 

“I do not stare,” he replied, refusing to be unnerved. “I watch. He is improving.” 

“It could take him a year or more to be back on his feet enough to even touch the suit,” she said, closing the cookbook and leaning on it. 

“Perhaps.” He crossed his arms. What did she want? 

“You don’t feel guilty for putting him there?” 

He bared his teeth, a reflexive action of fury, and realized as soon as it happened that was what she was looking for. Her expression changed, softened. 

“What do you want, Romanoff?”

“I have what I want,” she replied, and stood, sliding his cookbook back into its spot beside the microwave. “Buy a rotisserie.”

“I do not like your games.” 

“I’m not playing a game, Loki,” she replied, and for a moment, she just looked tired. “I just had to make sure you weren’t, either.” 

When he went back, Tony was asleep, but that damned tube was gone. He was covered in wires, still, but there was a difference to the way he was sleeping. He looked at the clipboard affixed to the end of Tony’s bed, but he understood none of it. Midgardian medics used unintelligible script, and language that made little sense. He stood for a long time, trying to decide if he should go, willing him to inhale when he exhaled, and each time he did, and each time he was relieved.

“Natasha thought I had some plot against you,” he murmured into the dimly lit room. “I was angry at her for thinking it.” He ran his fingers along the foot of the bed, the hard plastic unyielding and textured strangely. “I understand why she would worry. I do not have... a shining record. But then, neither do you.” He watched a machine, illuminating silently now where it beeped before, some rhythm of Tony’s body that Loki didn’t know. This many years in Midgard, and he still understood so little. “I think that’s why I’ve been so desperate to not lose you,” he said. “Natasha and Clint have their secrets, Bruce his guilt, but it isn’t like ours. Our shadows come from rejection, and we reach back for the light, though the darkness has changed us.” He watched Tony inhale again, and exhale, and inhale, on his own. Able. Healing. “It’s not a simple matter to restart a heart. Ostensibly, a shock of electricity-- nothing more-- but to start it, and keep it started? Healers are not exalted in Asgard, but they should be. It’s magic I should have gathered more knowledge of. Perhaps then...” he ran his fingers over the cotton blanket, and frowned. “Regret is a useless sentiment, and I find myself drowning in it nonetheless.” 

His fingers curled gently around Tony’s hand, his thumb brushing the unconscious man’s knuckles. “I am grateful you are alive,” he whispered. “If you had died I might have gone truly mad.” 

Did he imagine it, or did that hand curl slightly around his own? 

He could not explain, really, how he decided it was so important to lie beside the sleeping man that night, but it was. He held that hand, and curled his long frame around Tony, careful to rest his head above the wound below his ribs, just beside the glowing of the arc reactor. He could hear his heart, and something in his chest unknotted a little, hearing it strong, confident, telling him with every thump against that metal frame that Loki had not betrayed him with his mistake. 

_He would live. He would live. He would live._


End file.
